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hard drive, NAS, and SAN units, as well as high-speed networking equipment.

FEATURED by Mark May

A few years ago while attending EMC World, I had the chance to meet with Chuck Hollis and several other VMware employees to talk about an idea they had. They wanted to make use of untapped local storage resources inside an ESX host. Rather than simply holding the ESX boot image, they wanted to make the resource usable for virtual machines inside the entire ESX cluster. We talked over what seemed like a clustered file system that could protect data across ESX hosts. I pointed out that spinning disks are slow and they talked about using SSD drives to accelerate I/O operations. It was an interesting idea and I was curious if anything would ever come of it. As you might have guessed something did come of it: Virtual SAN. With the initial release of VSAN I was interested but, admittedly, a bit underwhelmed. Here we are, a year after general availability, and VSAN has taken a leap forward with the latest update to VSAN 6.0.

FEATURED by Adam Armstrong

Today SanDisk Corp, unveiled its new storage platform, the SanDisk InfiniFlash. The InfiniFlash creates an entirely new category in the IT industry as it geared toward and dubbed “Big Data Flash.” InfiniFlash comes in three configurations that are all aimed at delivering high capacity, high performance, and reliability for big data and hyperscale workloads.

FEATURED by Lyle Smith

HGST has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Amplidata, a privately-held developer of object storage software for public and private cloud data centers. This acquisition is in line with the company’s current focus on expanding into higher value data storage platforms and systems that offer value and scalability as well as tackling the constant growth in storage requirements in cloud data centers. Financial specifics were not released.

March 2nd, 2015 by Lyle Smith

Google has added status update functionality to their Status Dashboard of the Google Cloud Platform, acknowledging that even small interruptions can cause issues with users and businesses and lack of information pertaining to what’s going on only adds to the problem. This new transparency helps to improve their current tools and services, such as Google Cloud Monitoring, which monitors the health of a service. As such, Google hopes that these augmented services will help to make disruptions more manageable by presenting users with the latest information on all issues as well as the ability to help find workarounds to these issues.

February 26th, 2015 by Lyle Smith

WD has announced additions to their portfolio of network attached storage solutions with the new My Cloud Expert Series, which includes the My Cloud EX2100 (two-bay) and My Cloud EX4100 (four-bay) as well as the My Cloud Business Series, which includes the My Cloud DL2100 (two-bay), and My Cloud DL4100 (four-bay). These four new products are designed to address the increasing demands for content storage, management, protection and streaming among consumers.

February 25th, 2015 by Lyle Smith

Connected Data has announced the Transporter 15 and 30, two new private cloud file sync and share appliances designed to deliver critical business-class file sharing features, performance and capacity to small businesses, departments and remote offices. Both appliances help preserve the privacy and control of business data all the while offering users with the same benefits and experience as public cloud solutions like Dropbox. When coupled with Transporter, Transporter 75 and Transporter 150 appliances, Connected Data now offers a diverse range of private cloud file sync and share solutions for consumers and businesses of all sizes.

February 25th, 2015 by Lyle Smith

SolarWinds has announced new and enhanced product offerings designed to help IT ensure optimal application performance by monitoring the complete application stack (AppStack) through a single pane of glass. Enhancements include the new Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) and significant updates to Server & Application Monitor (SAM) as well as Virtualization Manager and Web Performance Monitor (WPM), which include greater integration with SolarWinds’ Orion technology and the new SolarWinds AppStack dashboard.

February 25th, 2015 by Josh Linden

Dell today published details for three new web-scale converged storage appliances that will be joining the company’s XC Series. The new appliances are built with 13G PowerEdge servers as the foundation and are equipped to handle applications such as virtual desktop infrastructure, private cloud storage, and big data. The new appliances can be configured with more than a 50% increase in storage capacity and double the rack density of previous XC offerings.

February 24th, 2015 by Josh Linden

The EchoStreams OSS1A is a 1U rack system engineered for use as a flexible appliance server platform most notable for its depth of only 21 inches. The OSS1A incorporates a dual-processor Intel C602A chipset and supports Intel Xeon E5-2600 V2 CPUs with up to 384GB of RAM in order to provide the horsepower necessary to handle a variety of duties in space-constrained and field deployments.

February 24th, 2015 by Josh Linden

The EchoStreams OSS1A is a 1U rack system engineered for use as a flexible appliance server platform most notable for its depth of only 21 inches. The OSS1A incorporates a dual-processor Intel C602A chipset and supports Intel Xeon E5-2600 V2 CPUs with up to 384GB of RAM in order to provide the horsepower necessary to handle a variety of duties in space-constrained and field deployments.

February 20th, 2015 by Adam Armstrong

The EchoStreams FlacheSAN1L-D is a storage-dense 1U form factor server that houses up to 20 7mm SATA SSDs. This ultra-high performance flash server is pitched as sustaining 112Gbps of throughput and up to 1 million plus IOPS with 20 SSDs. The platform supports dual Intel Haswell CPUs, up to 512GB of DDR4 RAM, and offers two PCIe Gen3 slots for expansion. The EchoStreams FlacheSAN1L-D has use cases both in the traditional data center and several that couldn't be further away from those friendly confines. The combination of storage density, performance and cost make this unique platform one of the more flexible available.

February 16th, 2015 by Adam Armstrong

The Dell Precision Tower 7810 is a high-end desktop workstation that is highly customizable to its given need. The 7810 is all about giving users the power they need for intensive applications and graphics-rich workloads. The tower comes with either single or dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors, up to 256GB of quad-channel 2133MHz DDR4 ECC RIMM RAM, a range of different AMD FirePro or NVIDIA Quadro graphic cards, and the 7810 offers the option of traditional drives (with optional Intel CAS-W software solutions that enable I/O speeds close to SSD configurations) and SSD drives. New today is also support for Intel's P3700 PCIe SSD, which provides even more performance for hefty enterprise workloads within the workstation form factor.

February 11th, 2015 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Exablox’s OneBlox embodies a distinctive approach to streamlining storage for unstructured information. OneBlox offers a range of enterprise scale-out NAS functionality including a global filesystem that can span multiple 2U OneBlox nodes as a OneBlox ring with up to 336TB that incorporates global inline deduplication and continuous data protection. OneBlox also allows administrators to 'bring their own drives' by populating the appliance with a combination of SATA and SAS drives and capacities.

February 6th, 2015 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

There have been several methods of Out-of-Band (OOB) Management for server assets over the years. The two that are still quite popular are KVM (Keyboard/Video/Mouse) switches that are often IP-enabled, and some form of Lights Out Management such as HP’s iLO (Integrated Lights-Out Management.) All Out-of-Band Management solutions can make maintaining and supporting servers elsewhere more convenient whether located across a building or on the other side of the world.